AAP faces another row over its in-house survey

A day after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) faced a controversy over its leader Arvind Kejriwal meeting a certain cleric from Bareilly, the political entrants on Wednesday faced yet another controversy over its in-house survey.

Twitter was abuzz with charges about how AAP is a Congress front because it chose a company, which has a Congressman as one of the two directors. In the third phase of the survey, AAP had given itself a 28% vote share and Kejriwal as popular preference for the post of chief minister.

A link leading to an article “Proof that Aam Aadmi Party is a front of Congress, survey is false’ on a web-based newswire site claimed that one of the two partners of Cicero Associates & Consultants is an office bearer of Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC). The DPCC website on Wednesday showed Madhur’s photo and his Badarpur address.

Incidentally, a few days ago while answering questions about various surveys doing rounds ahead of the Delhi elections, Kejriwal had literally trashed a survey done for channel India TV because the person who had done the survey was associated with RSS.

Yogender Yadav, psephologist and AAP’s national executive member, who was in-charge of the AAP survey conducted in three phases since February, “Sunit was associated with Congress party earlier (but) I do not know of any of his involvement with Congress as on today.”

However, when his attention was drawn to Kejriwal’s comment on a television survey by a person associated with RSS, Yadav said, “In this case, Cicero’s ‘Article of Association’ – a legal document – clearly indicates that surveys are done by Dhananjai Joshi and not by Sunit Madhur.”

Sunit Madhur could not be reached, but Joshi washed his hands away from any of AAP’s claims. “He (Sunit) is a professional political consultant and also a member of International Association of Political Consultants. He is not active in DPCC even though his name figures in the committee formed seven years ago.”

“I am in-charge of all surveys. Ours is a neutral organisation and we work for whosoever commissions our surveys,” he added.